Souvik Ghosh – new PhD student

/in ,

Souvik obtained his BS-MS dual degrees in chemical sciences from IISER Kolkata, India and joined Huck group to pursuit Ph.D. journey (from September 1, 2021 onwards). Here, he will be working on designing/ reconstructing multiple enzymatic reaction networks via immobilizing enzymes onto beads to study networks dynamics and subsequently optimize to produce chemicals as outputs.

 

Welcome Souvik to the Huck group!

Rianne Haije – new PhD student

/in ,

Rianne comes from a small town in the Netherlands, called Heino. She moved to Nijmegen and obtained both her bachelor’s and master’s degree at the Radboud University. During this time, she discovered the wonderful world of organic chemistry and was especially fascinated by photoswitchable molecules. Therefore, she will continue to work on the synthesis and application of these molecules in complex enzymatic reaction networks. When she is not in the lab, she likes to cycle, play volleyball and hang out with her friends.

Welcome Rianne to the Huck group!

New paper on a Phosphorylating System for the Origins of Life

/in ,

At the Origins of Life, the transfer of scarce phosphate to the organic molecules that make up biochemistry is a significant challenge for prebiotic chemistry. Here we show a prebiotic physicochemical cycle to activate orthophosphate and via a kinetically stable thermodynamically activated molecule phosphorylate all of Life’s basic building blocks. Excitingly, this system is constructed along the same principles by which Life transfers phosphate within cells. We are very grateful to the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life for supporting this research.

 

The paper is here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25555-x

 

You can read a summary of the paper here:

https://twitter.com/oliver_maguire/status/1438836473973952515

GitHub workshop

/in ,

Today two PhD students Melde and Mathieu organised the first computational workshop ‘Working with GitHub’. Everybody in the department, from student to PI, was welcome to join. Learning how to use GitHub is a hugely relevant skill for modern working environments, and for doing collaborative and reproducible science with a computational aspect, from simple data analysis to large-scale simulations. We learnt a lot and are looking forward to the future workshops!

Dr. Vibhute

/in ,

Today (29 June, 2021) Mahesh Vibhute defended his PhD thesis entitled “Reconstituting living cells. Mobility, reactivity and asymmetry in cytomimetic crowded protocells.”

Big congratulations, Dr. Vibhute and good luck to your future career!

NWO XS grant for Dr. Francesca Rivello

/in

Dr. Francesca Rivello, with Dr. Eng. Kinga Matuła as collaborator, won a 50kEuro grant in the NWO XS competition. This is an ambitious and complex project that seeks to address emerging challenges connected with single-cell multi-omics analysis, both experimental and bioinformatic. During the next eight months Francesca and Kinga will use previously developed technology for single cell transcriptomics and intracellular protein analysis to test four different cancer drugs (BTK inhibitors). They want to compare mode of action of the different drug molecules to unravel differences in the cellular responses.

Postdoctoral fellowship grant for Dr. Tao Zhou

/in

Dr. Tao Zhou has been recently awarded a Postdoctoral Mobility Fellowship, funded by The Swiss National Science Foundation. This fellowship supports postdoctoral researchers to extend their scientific network and enhance their scientific profile for a period of two years outside of Switzerland. In the next two years, Tao will work on reconstituting enzymatic reaction networks compartmentalised in hydrogel beads to synthesise valuable compounds.

Michael’s goodbye party

/in

This month Dr. Michael Teders said goodbye to our group as he found a new job in Germany. Michael was part of the Huck group for about two years and made a significant progress in the fields of photochemistry and enzymatic chemical reaction networks. On his last day we had a small farewell gathering with loads of German sweets. We thank Michael for being a member of the Huck group and we wish best of luck for his future career!

Sammie – our new group member

/in

Please welcome our new lab support member – Sammie!

Sammie is a 3-month labrador and currently is working from home. His main job is to keep everyone around happy. And he’s very good at it! At the moment he is busy with the puppy training. His interests include food and chewing everything he can find around, especially the computer cables.

Join Us

/in

We are always looking for talented postdoctoral researchers and PhD candidates who are interested in origins of life, synthetic cells, coacervates, physical biology and multi-omics analysis methods in general, who like to work in an interdisciplinary cutting-edge environment. If you are interested in joining, please contact us directly to explore fellowship opportunities (please include a CV, and two academic references).